End Yuzu and Citra (the second as a corollary) was almost a given when the reasons why Nintendo decided to sue Tropic Haze became known, prominent among them being the fact that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was launched by Yuzu users a week before its official release.

Those responsible for Yuzu and Citra weren’t particularly smart, which made it easy for Nintendo to prove that the former was used to pirate material. With the two emulators gone, Big N Video Games now has telemetry data from Yuzu and Patreon contributors that, according to its version, proves that said software was used to launch pirated material, something that cannot be denied when it comes to titles that have yet to be released .

Those responsible for Yuzu apparently decided to make a deal to avoid being found out because they could be found guilty of misdemeanors like sharing games with each other. However, it is important to note that these facts have not been verified due to an out-of-court settlement in which Tropic Haze agreed to pay $2.4 million to Nintendo, stop development of Yuzu and Citra, and deliver to the company material covering devices, hard drives and domains .

This is where we get to the darker part of the matter because Nintendo now owns the data of people who supported Yuzu through Patreon and the data collected through the telemetry present in the appso in a way you can say that the people behind Tropic Haze sold their own users’ data so they wouldn’t end up totally burned.

If the judge approves the deal and events go according to plan, The people who were officially part of Tropic Haze, which was a limited liability company (LLC), won’t face any consequences other than what was agreed with Nintendo, but others could end up being sued especially if they can be proven to have executed Tears of the Kingdom or contributed to improve its compatibility with Yuzu prior to its release, not including other types of material that may be considered piracy in one way or another. Seeing how relentless Nintendo is when it comes to defending its intellectual property, one might not guess that the scope of what constitutes piracy is very broad for the company.

We’ll see what Nintendo decides to do with the material they obtained from Tropic Haze, especially with possible legal action they may take against other people over the matter. The company discovered the pie by infiltrating the Yuzu Discord server, which shows what we already said in this article: those responsible for the emulator were not particularly smart.

Cover image created by artificial intelligence.